Errollyn Wallen at Wigmore Hall

 Errollyn Wallen, Wigmore Hall, Oct 28

I don't make the trek up to London as often as I once did, having plenty close at hand in the Portsmouth area, but sometimes it's all but essential - in my judgement- and I never get it wrong. Errollyn Wallen was a dead cert, unlike the horse that I'd got back to a William Hill shop at Victoria to see held up, come through readily as per the plan, look to finesse the generous odds by half a length and then let the other horse do him on the line. However, that's not the point.

Errollyn's manifesto is quite rightly not to have a manifesto. In the same way that it doesn't matter if a poem is a sonnet, or even if it's a poem, really, music doesn't need to be in a genre and hers isn't. Now, in the Age of Spotify, it's not such a problem that record shops need to put the records into categories. It was once necessary to know one's Arvo Part from one's Elbow but it's less of a concern now to know whether Errollyn belongs in Classical, Jazz, Contemporary or, more likely, all of the above.

It was certainly useful to know that My Hitler is written from the point of view of Eva Braun. What's Up Doc? rattled along at what might have been a couple of clicks of tempo quicker then the record and then Greenwich Variations would surely have to be 'jazz' even if it is bluesy, hides its Goldberg allusions and then the left hand grumbles and rumbles up a storm.

Daedalus was always likely to be a highlight, being born out of one chord to reach dreamy heights. The sound system made Errollyn's voice lusher yet in its higher reaches. In the unlikely event she's ever in need of  a cover version to fill out an album, Kate Bush's This Woman's Work would work for this woman.

It's not only musically 'intertextual' when we are for a few bars entirely within a Bach Partita or Louis' Loops cites Couperin, Errollyn is a poet, too, and in Meet Me at Harold Moores,

the evening is laid out against the sky

does with T.S. Eliot that which Eliot did with the rest of Eng. Lit. and recycles it.

But not to 'shore up such fragments against her ruin'. Errollyn is a generous spirit, very happily involved in her work, entirely genuine and variously talented. If I believed in 'inspiration' I'd probably say she was 'inspirational' but I don't think it works like that. Ideas suggest themselves, yes, but after that there is work involved.

She is much-loved and she much loves her audience. I'm sure she's not just saying that. Today was not a sell-out but the pile of her new book sold out. I witnessed the last, display copy being whipped off its stand before whoever found themselves at the back of the queue to get theirs signed would have been away no earlier than mid-afternoon and, you'd think, Errollyn would have deserved some refreshment and a rest after fielding such a torrent of niceties, questions and curve balls one after the other but she does it with such immense charm and enthusiasm. Having a lighthouse to retire back to must be a great comfort.

Fittingly, on a day like today when I got lucky by being indoors for the more serious weather, Rain was the encore in inverse proportion to when I saw the Magnetic Fields on a day of antediluvian downpour but, Stephin Merritt being Stephin, did not do All the Umbrellas in London. 

I did wonder what a Stephin/Errollyn collaboration might be like but some things are best left as ideas 'begotten upon impossibility'. Dark ironies and authentic love aren't compatible.

There's plenty of Ella in Errollyn's singing as there are plenty of her own ideas in her music in among all those ghosts that are either invoked or turn up uninvited anyway. None of the comparisons are especially useful, though, beyond being signposts to where she is. Like any artist would like to be able to say, she's not really like any of them, she is herself and very good at it. She can say that more convincingly than almost anybody else I can think of.